UN: Human rights situation still critical in Colombia

The "democratic security" policy of the government of Álvaro Uribe could have negative effects on the conduct of members of the security forces, the United Nations warns in a human rights report on Colombia. In the context of the ongoing civil war, the government should stop gauging the success of military operations by the number of casualties, which is one of the main incentives for extrajudicial killings, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) states in its annual report on this South American country. The report, released on Mar. 15, says military officers have been accused of staging terrorist attacks that are falsely attributed to the main rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and of presenting the victims of extrajudicial executions as people killed in combat with leftists. According to the Colombian Commission of Jurists, an internationally renowned human rights group, members of the security forces committed 726 extrajudicial executions from July 2002 to June 2006–a period roughly coinciding with Uribe's first term–in 27 of the 32 departments into which the country is divided. Given their magnitude and territorial extension, the extrajudicial killings do not appear to be isolated incidents, but conduct that tends to become more and more widespread, the UNHCHR adds in the report that was presented to the Human Rights Council, on Mar. 12 in Geneva. The report says three common elements were identified in many of the reported cases: the presentation of civilian victims as people killed in combat; tampering with the scene of the crime by the perpetrators themselves; and investigations of the abuses by the military justice system. The UNHCHR report presents 18 recommendations entailing 45 different measures, including 39 to be taken by the state. Of these, 17 should be adopted by the executive branch itself, and others by parliament, the attorney general's office, the electoral authority and other bodies. One of the recommendations is that the murders of trade unionists, journalists, teachers and human rights activists be clarified. The UN office also issues recommendations for the guerrillas, the far-right paramilitary militias, civil society and the international community. Uribe claims that his democratic security policy–his winning platform in 2002 as well as in the 2006 elections in which he won a second four-year term–is not related to the national security doctrine that was implemented throughout Latin America after the Cuban revolution, and which saw citizens themselves as possible security threats. The government's democratic security agenda has included granting the military a range of police powers, and creating an enormous network of civilian collaborators and informants who are paid to provide information about the insurgents. The right-wing president, who says his aim is for state security forces to have a monopoly on weapons in the country, negotiated a controversial partial demobilization of the paramilitary umbrella organization, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, and is now engaged in exploratory talks with the second-largest insurgent group, the National Liberation Army. At the same time, with US financing and advice, his administration has maintained an all-out offensive against the FARC, following a strategy of "removing the water from the fish" by attacking or forcibly displacing from their land rural residents and communities seen as providing the powerful guerrilla group with a social support base. In February, the government committed itself to bringing to justice, in civilian courts, members of the security forces accused of human rights violations–a pledge that prompted a written protest from 200 retired officers. But UNHCHR representative in Colombia Juan Pablo Corlazzoli said in a Mar. 15 press conference that the Uribe administration has failed to live up to that commitment. The UN report also refers to the right of citizens to have access to intelligence files that have been compiled on them. The authorities have failed to live up to their commitment to review the criteria by which such reports are put together. Among the people targeted by intelligence bodies are human rights defenders. Corlazzoli said Colombia's intelligence systems must be reviewed so that they are not in line with the old national security doctrine, and are instead in accordance with a democratic society. Colombia's paramilitaries have close ties to the security forces, and were created by regional elites, many of whom were involved in the drug trade. With respect to the ongoing scandal in which pro-Uribe legislators have been arrested for collusion with the paramilitaries, the UNHCHR encourages the judiciary to continue investigating public servants and political leaders with links to the right-wing militias. The report states that there are still political and economic structures of demobilized paramilitary groups that have yet to be dismantled, and that some 3,000 to 5,000 members of the groups have reorganized and must stop engaging in criminal activity.